Opens Thursday, May 23rd, 7-9 pm. To June 29, 2013.
Natasha McHardy and Marina Roy started working together to produce video works as the artist-duo Roy & McHardy in 2003. While maintaining their own separate practices over the past few years, their artwork continues to share an interest in materiality, craft, surreal and folk sensibilities, and gender/race/class issues. McHardy’s new body of work incorporates recurring motifs within a theatrical stage, including pools, cacti, palm trees, screens, animals, and kitsch icons. These surreal relief constructions combine abstraction and representation, drawing and collage, exoticism and colonial histories. Roy’s work explores the construction of grotesque emblems and rebuses, using an archive of images that recall her past animations. Human, animal, plant, mineral entities combine, breaking down taxonomic categories between living and non-living entities. Mining a naïve aesthetic, both of their practices question hierarchies within art historical and market systems, combining high and low art traditions, all the while reflecting on the nature of power structures that fix life into an allegorical image.
McHardy received a BFA and MFA from the University of British Columbia and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Centre A Centre for Contemporary Art, the Shanghai Art Museum, Or Gallery, the Belkin Satellite Gallery, and the Helen Pitt Gallery. She was recipient of the BC Binning Drawing Award in 2001. Marina Roy received a BA in French Literature at Université Laval, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and her MFA from the University of British Columbia. She has shown nationally and internationally including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Or Gallery Berlin, Contemporary Art Gallery, Gallery Sumukha, Chennai & Bengaluru, India, and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Roy was recipient of the VIVA award in 2010.
